Project 2025, a political agenda by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, seeks to empower the next conservative president towards what appears to be a more blatantly authoritarian style of government, including promoting election denialism and defanging watchdog organizations.

“This is an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country. The Heritage Foundation is once again facilitating this work, but as our dozens of partners and hundreds of authors will attest, this book is the work of the entire conservative movement,” the Project 2025 website states. Emphases included in the original quote on the Project 2025 website.

One way Project 2025 seeks to rectify the election issues it claims occurred in 2020, when former President Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden, would be to politicize the U.S. Department of Justice.

“I think the entire premise— or one of the core tenets— of Project 2025 is to realize former President Trump’s goal of making the Department of Justice a political prosecutorial arm of the President, and we saw in Trump’s term, you know, how he pushed back against the Department’s independence and attempted to interfere with its independence in any number of ways,” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Executive Director and Chief Counsel Donald Sherman told the NM Political Report. 

Sherman referenced Trump firing James Comey from his position as FBI director.

Comey was fired in May 2017 on allegations he made mistakes during the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Trump said he “acted on the ‘clear’ advice of U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, according to UPI reporting at the time.

Election interference

Project 2025 claims the FBI knew the 2016 election Russia collusion claims were false.

The Associated Press reported in May 2023 when the Mueller report came out that missteps were made during that investigation including confirmation bias.

However, a 2022 report by the National Intelligence Council showed that foreign interference in U.S. elections has normalized, including from Iran, the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation.

Collusion and foreign election interference are two different allegations.

Collusion is when an agreement is made between two sides and foreign election interference is when someone or a government tries to influence an election 

Related: Foreign election interference has normalized, report states

This means that although direct collusion to tilt the 2020 election in Trump’s favor was largely untrue, interference from sources beyond our borders was and remains an issue.

“Instead of interference, the (intelligence community) assesses adversaries so far are focused on using information operations and propaganda to try to shape voter preferences or undermine confidence in the election,” the Director of National Intelligence September 2024 Election Security Update states. 

Closer to home, Project 2025 aims to intimidate those enforcing state law with regard to elections.

One of the things Project 2025 would do is reassign prosecution responsibility from the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ to the department’s Criminal Division.

“So they can bring criminal charges against and use the power of the Department of Justice as a cudgel to intimidate people who are enforcing state law,” Sherman said.

Project 2025 also addresses personnel issues such as directing the Attorney General to defend the Federal Elections Commission “in all litigation when there is a failure of the commissioners to authorize the general counsel of the agency to defend it” and also to “remove the agency’s independent litigating authority and rely on the Department of Justice to handle all litigation involving the FEC.”

Other Justice Department changes would include “removing hundreds of lawyers from the department civil service employees, and packing it with sufficient political appointees that they won’t have any trouble,” according to Dede Feldman of Common Cause New Mexico.

“They also have specifically recommended that any litigation stemming from the Justice Department, which is an independent agency currently—although many of its top folks are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate—they don’t want to allow the Justice Department to initiate any litigation. It’s only the executive. There can be no and it says that there will be no litigation without presidential guardians. So it sounds like they’re actually, you know, grooming for dictatorship,” Feldman told NM Political Report. 

Defanging the watchdogs

CREW is a watchdog organization that files ethics complaints. Project 2025 requests that the DOJ “should reject demands from third-party groups that ask it to threaten politically motivated investigation or prosecution of those engaging in lawful and, in many cases, constitutionally protected activity. By acceding to such demands, the department risks diminishing its credibility with the American public,” Project 2025 states.

The “risks,” according to the document, include that communications between third party groups can be made public through subpoena, Freedom of Information Act requests or can be made public by the third parties themselves.

“Essentially what this means is going after watchdogs, both watchdogs who like (CREW) who file ethics complaints, more important advocacy that civil rights organizations have been doing for decades to ensure that all people have a free and fair opportunity to vote,” Sherman said.

Election denialism

Election denialism and Trump’s speech on Jan. 6, 2021 fueled an angry mob to try to obstruct the 2020 election’s certification going on at the time.

In an attempt to prevent the chaos on Jan. 6, 2021, the Secret Service is adding security measures on election certification day in January, according to NBC News.

“CREW is a nonpartisan, so I won’t speak to you know, the election, but it is obvious that the steps that President Trump has been pushing in terms of… supporting election deniers in states like New Mexico and elsewhere are all aimed at an effort to undermine the administration of the election, and potentially to overturn the election, both in the immediate aftermath and ultimately, on Jan. 6,” Sherman said. “Donald Trump is given every indication that he will not accept the results of the election unless he prevails and that he will use extra legal means in order to rally his supporters around chasing the result, regardless of what state law requires or demands.”

Election misinformation is rampant this election season ranging from debunked conspiracies about immigrants eating pets in Ohio to the noncitizens voting in elections.

Noncitizen voting and how, although it happens from time to time, is not a systematic issue were discussed during a House Administration Committee meeting Sept. 11.

New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver testified with a bipartisan group of five other secretaries of state from across the country.

The hearing came on the heels of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or the SAVE Act, which would require voters to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to vote in federal elections being included in the federal founding stopgap bill aimed at preventing a government shutdown.

The vote on the stopgap legislation was expected to happen Friday but was postponed by House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, according to Reuters.

“This is about sowing the seeds of doubt in our election. You know, attempting to empower conspiracy theorists and loyalists who are in office to use every tool that they can to question the results if they don’t like the results of the election, and then ultimately repeating an attempt to overturn the election if (Trump) does not prevail,” Sherman said.

Related: New Mexico elected officials named in election certification report

These seeds of doubt, as Sherman put it, resulted in Otero County in southern New Mexico not certifying the election according to New Mexico law.

The all-Republican Otero County Commission refused to certify primary election results in 2022 when a failsafe built into the New Mexico Constitution in the event county commissions acting as county canvass boards refused to certify election results.

This failsafe was built into the state constitution in 1953. These processes had never been used until 2020.

The commission eventually certified the election results after being ordered to do so by the state Supreme Court.